Get to know the keynotes, then find out when you can hear from them in the 23NTC program.
Mesiah Burciaga-Hameed
Chair
Native Land
Pronouns: they/them
Mesiah Burciaga-Hameed is a Black and Indigenous two-spirit land defender, artist, and high vision strategist.
Mesiah utilizes their ancestors’ practices to bring about integrated change to the ways we relate to this time on the planet. They carry the medicine of expanded sight and find tangible solutions to complex problems. They grew up on the frontlines in Huichin (Oakland, California) and Lenapehoking (Brooklyn, New York). Resiliently guided by their mother’s participation in social justice and community organizing, as well as their father’s ability to transform life experiences into art, they focus on their innate ability to weave webs of connection with other artists and leaders that shape and influence our current world.
Bringing together different universes, Mesiah centers the need for a blueprint to be created to properly educate and unpack the trauma and actions of the past we are actively trying to shift. They welcome the depths, roots, and seeds of genocide and cultural erasure to honor the journey of truth we wish to embark on.
One of the ways Mesiah uses their gifts of high vision strategy is as the chair of Native Land, a digital platform that maps The Earth through the lens of Indigenous communities and stewardship.
Evan Greer
Director
Fight for the Future
Pronouns: she/her
Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine calls Evan Greer "a heck of a guitarist," but she's better known as a queer activist and writer who has been on the frontlines of some of the most high profile grassroots victories of the last decade.
Evan is the director of Fight for the Future, the viral digital rights nonprofit known for organizing the largest online protests in human history. She's also a regular commentator on TV and radio talking about tech policy, free expression, LGBTQ+ liberation, and human rights.
For years, Evan has toured internationally as an indie punk singer/songwriter and speaker, sharing stages with artists as diverse as Pete Seeger, Talib Kweli, Chumbawamba, and Against Me. Her last album, "Spotify is Surveillance," hit the very bottom of the Billboard charts, and was featured in Rolling Stone and Pitchfork. Evan has been a guest on All Things Considered, Good Morning America, and Democracy Now, and she writes regularly for outlets like the Washington Post, NBC News, TIME Magazine, Wired, Vice, Buzzfeed, and The Guardian.
Follow her on Twitter @evan_greer or on Mastodon mastodon.online/@evangreer.
Evan Greer photo credit: kayana szymczak.
Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble
Professor of Gender Studies and African American Studies
University of California, Los Angeles
Pronouns: she/her
Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble is an internet studies scholar and Professor of Gender Studies and African American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she serves as the interim director of the UCLA DatX Initiative. She is also a 2021 MacArthur Foundation Fellow and the inaugural recipient of the NAACP-Archewell Digital Civil Rights Award.
Safiya wrote a best-selling book on racist and sexist algorithmic bias in commercial search engines, entitled “Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism” (NYU Press), which has been widely-reviewed in journals and periodicals including the Los Angeles Review of Books, featured in the New York Public Library 2018 Best Books for Adults (non-fiction), and recognized by Bustle magazine as one of 10 Books about Race to Read Instead of Asking a Person of Color to Explain Things to You.
She and her work have been featured in TIME, The Guardian, the BBC, CNN International, Wired, and The New York Times, among many others. Her talks and research focus on the ways that digital media impacts our lives and intersects with issues of race, gender, culture, and technology.
Follow her on Twitter @safiyanoble.
Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble photo credit: John Davis.
